By Akani Nkuna
The Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua) has played down the recent arrests of over 400 illegal miners at the Sheba Mine in Barberton as performative justice, saying that the real masterminds were left to roam free whilst the focus iwas on poor Black workers trying to make a living for themselves.
MACUA spokesperson Tholakele Thabane said on Tuesday that the arrests captured the real picture of the ongoing failure by the South African law enforcement agencies to confront the real architecture of illegal mining.
“Over 400 arrests have taken place this last week alone. As has become the norm, those arrested are overwhelmingly poor Black workers, many of them migrants, forced into informal mining by economic desperation and exclusion from the formal economy,” he said.
“These arrests are presented as victories, with police parading mining tools, shovels and makeshift explosives as evidence of ‘progress’ in the fight against syndicates.”
This comes after a police-led raid through Operation Vala Mgodi was conducted at the Barberton mine on Friday, where the illegal miners were smoked out and subsequently taken to custody by the Mpumalanga police officials.
According to reports, the majority of them were undocumented foreign nationals.
Thabane alleges that the mass arrests were a smokescreen to create an illusion of law enforcement while presenting no substantial solution to the problem. Illegal mining syndicate used the poor to facilitate it, and the rich financed it under protection by the powerful.
“But let us be clear: after nearly three years of Operation Vala Umgodi, launch in December 2022, no high-level syndicate bosses have been arrested, no corporate directors have been charged, and no elite political or financial figures have been held accountable,” Thabane added.
“Hundreds of millions of rands have been spent, and all the state has to show for it are the bodies of almost 100 miners who they starved to death and images of shackled miners, not the dismantling of syndicates.”
Macua is demanding Parliamentary hearings where it will be invited to present its full submission in the presence of the media and civil society.
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